Making investigative decisions, especially those that have the potentially to impact lives and communities, requires access to up-to-date and accurate investigative information. Unfortunately, investigative information is often spread across multiple databases, computers, geographies, and clearance levels. For investigative organizations such as intelligence, defense, and law enforcement organizations to be successful, they need ways to share and find information quickly so that critical decisions can be made in time for them to have impact.
One complication to sharing investigative data between investigative teams is that some of teams may be located in geographic locations where network connectivity is unreliable or impractical. For example, a forward deployed military unit may have only periodic access to a satellite-based network. Thus, solutions for sharing data that presume highly-available network connectivity may be inadequate or inefficient.
Currently, there exist commercial software products for replicating database data between distributed database instances. These software products, for example, allow an administrator to export database data from a first database instance, copy the exported database data to a second database instance, and once copied, import the exported database data into the second database instance. This process of replicating database data can be tedious, time-consuming, or unreliable, especially when the data network connecting the first and second instances is unreliable and the amount of exported database data is large.